We're pushing to bring you a completely fresh and new way to play challenges.

We’ve evolved the Freeburn Challenge experience in 3 major ways for "Cagney":

1. Multi part challenges

We've started to string together multiple challenges – this adds depth and allows you to play a heap of challenges in sequence.

Here's how it can work – 8 players hook up at the Observatory on White Mountain and head for the Rock Hole on South Mountain Drive taking in a long sequence of challenges. Jump over Dead Man’s Edge, hit the windmill jump, race through the tubes in the building site and nail the jump sequence leading to the rock hole.

That's the sequence we play-tested today. Because so many of us were crowding through the jumps they became completely chaotic and hilarious. Stacking it in first place then repeatedly watching your rivals slam into your crash debris as you try to restart caused some immense comedy moments. The carnage contributes to creating a constantly changing Freeburn Challenge environment – it's great fun.

But that's not all...

2. Timed Challenges

Each of our new Challenges has a time limit that really encourages cooperation. If the team doesn’t finish in time, everybody fails.

It's co-operative, but there's a competitive edge too. We call out the player that performed best, so while everyone works together to get the best team time, they’re still competing against each other to be the first to finish.

3. Co-op Leaderboards

And finally, each Challenge has it’s very own Leaderboard. Once you’ve nailed the target time, you can compete to reach the top of the Leaderboard.

Here are some 2, 3 and 4 player examples that will be coming in Cagney.

Partners In Time

Here, you can see a 2-player Challenge. Charnjit and SteveW are trying to near-miss each other in mid-air, before jumping over each other to beat the challenge. Charnjit wastes valuable seconds lining up for jump.



Rail Cars

This one's 3-player. Meet up at the yellow bridge then head to the Read Lane Super Jump and complete the barrel rolls. This is always harder when the pressure is on, in the video you’ll see Charnjit miss his first attempt!



Leaps of Faith

And finally, everyone meets up at Charnjit Communications Tower and then rushes to N. Rouse Drive to hit the Super Jumps down to the train track 5 times. DiscoD ends up being the fastest to the jump and contributing the most overall!



Stayed tuned for more details – if you check back to the site tomorrow and you'll find videos for 5, 6, 7 and 8 player Challenges!

We've been talking here at Criterion about getting a live update board in Burnout Paradise for a long time, so it's great to be able to finally unveil something!

Here's an early shot, which contains much of the info you'll see as part of our "Cagney" update at the end of June.

The game will automatically launch this page, when you start the game, but you'll also be able to access it anytime during the game.



Global Paradise News

We've recently relaunched criteriongames.com as a blog - we want to update you daily on our progress transforming your Paradise City experience through game-changing downloadable content.

This is a cool feature that allows us to bring you the best of the blog without leaving the comfort of Paradise City.

We'll hit you with all the latest news from the team and also info like how many of your rivals are live and who's storming up the leaderboards.

We're also using our game telemetry to bring you some cool "previously in Burnout"-style info.

Here, we'll call out events that have happened in Paradise City in the last 24 hours, like the 150 millionth Takedown or your fastest Road Rules time or Showtime score getting beaten.

For the first time, we're able to talk direct to everyone playing Paradise.


Game Calendar

The game calendar lets us call out special events on particular days.

We want to minimise any delays getting you new and exciting game content. We can now do this with server-side changes. For example if we've got an awesome new car like the Hunter Olympus (announced today!) we don't have to wait 6 weeks, while we go through testing to get it to you.

If we want to bring you a special boost free racing day, test a prototype car for a few hours or reward our best forum posters with something special...it's no problem!

The calendar is where we can call this out.




There's a ton of exciting new gameplay we can bring you. it's much, much more than a "fancy calender". It's also just our 1.0 version of this feature. Like everything announced as part of our Year of Paradise, we expect to evolve it beyond recognition throughout the course of the year.


Burnout Paradise Weather Update and Clock





This is a report for your local area, so you can see what weather you're missing, while you stay in and play Burnout Paradise. The clock's a reminder that you're being updated live from the Paradise City servers!

We look forward to bringing you new info on this as soon as we're ready to talk in more detail about our "Davis" update...

Well fear not as its available to watch HERE!

This first video is Part 1. We talk about all our Cagney update content.



Here's Part 2, where we cover bikes, planes and night-time in Paradise City.

Guess you want to talk about what you have just watched now huh? Head over to the forums and get posting.

This is the biggest news in Burnout history!

For the first time, we'll let you loose in a Burnout game on motorbikes!

And because we're dedicated to bringing you game-changing new Burnout Paradise content all year, bikes will feature their own game modes, challenges and even some new locations tailored to fit their unique performance and handing characteristics.

The other big news relating to bikes is that we've introduced night-time to Burnout Paradise for the first time.

We wanted to clear the traffic out a little to give you the chance to learn how to ride in safety, and we've always wanted to cruise the streets of Paradise City with incredible night-time visuals.

We expect to ship bikes as part of our Davis software update, due for release sometime in August.

As always, we're bringing you the hot news from Criterion Games as it happens. Hit the site soon for more news and the first high-definition bike footage.

Here's a shot of the Hunter Olympus - the first vehicle without Boost in a Burnout game.




It'll be coming to you in the Cagney update for Burnout Paradise.

Big thanks to everyone who sent in designs for our new liveries competition!

We got a huge number of great designs through and it was a tough call on the final cars.

In the end, the Paradise Car team picked out 2 winners: the "Oval Steel Racer" and the "Carson Hippie Van"

Oval Steel Racer

This car's got Burnout written all over it – raw, menacing and tough. The Car Team wanted to retain the spirit of the original design, when bringing it to life in Paradise's usual crystal-clear detail and style.

Here's the original design sent through by our winner.




And here are some shots of the car as it looks in Paradise City.










The biggest challenge was getting the back of the car right. We didn't include this in the template, and it's the part of the car you see most, when you play.

We tried putting another set of eyes there, but changed it, because we wanted it to feel like there was only one "soul" inside the car. In the end we went for torn metal, which looks awesome.

Both these designs came from a Polish fan – Krzysiek Ociepka. We wanted to give him credit for the designs in the game, so we gave him a signature on the cars – you can clearly see his PSN ID: "Crazystof" on the back and side of the car, although this is actually incorrect. We'll correct this soon - the actual PSN ID is "CRAZYSZTOF". Be sure to look him up in Paradise City sometime soon!




Hippy Van

Here's the original design:




This design was a million miles from anything we'd have done ourselves during Paradise production. And that's why we love it!

Burnout Paradise is not just about taking each other down. There's some cooperation in there, too! The message here is all about social gameplay – the "Make Love not War Van" is the perfect reminder.













Hope you like the final result!

Well done Krzysiek and everyone who sent in designs...we'll be running something like this again and giving you a chance to get a little bit of your own content in Paradise City.

We're transforming Paradise City of the next 12 months in what we're calling "The Year of Paradise".

We've announced a few details already, but today we're going to blow the lid off a couple of exciting new features for the first time.

Our next 3 content updates will be codenamed "Cagney", "Davis" and "Eastwood"

"Cagney" will be available at the end of June.

Davis will follow sometime in August.

Eastwood will be next, in Fall.

We'll confirm exact dates as soon as we have them.

These dates are obviously subject to change, depending on Sony and Microsoft's rigorous test programs, but we wanted to let you know what we're aiming for as soon as possible.

And to make it easy to see what's coming and when, we've given criteriongames.com a bit of an overhaul.

For all the detail, hit the tabs marked "Cagney", "Davis" and "Eastwood" at the top of this page. We'll be updating these sections with everything you need to know about our new Burnout content, starting with a ton of news unveiled in this week's live podcast!

We're back on despite an audio drop-out.

Hit this link to watch and listen.

Click through the link in the story below to check it out.

Hit this link to stream this week's Crash FM podcast live - any minute now.

AlexW and the crew will be playing through the latest software and lifting the lid on all the content from our big software update - codenamed Cagney - as well as some of the the hottest news for "The Year of Paradise"!